Dead of Summer

Dead of Summer starts out feeling like an homage to ’80s slasher films with a dash of “Beverly Hills 90210” here and a sprinkling of “Heathers” there. And that could be a lot of fun, but it’s a hard tone to authentically sustain, and soon enough the pilot episode becomes more like a library book in the young-adults section that never gets checked out anymore.

This is not a show that is particularly original; every twist is a cliché, and every character is playing to type. But with so many well-worn at play, Dead of Summer makes for a schlocky hour that never quite gets boring.

Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis and Ian B. Goldberg ("Once Upon a Time") created Dead of Summer, and they have paid more attention to the moody atmosphere and opportunities for scares than to the characters--at least, the living ones.

Dead Of Summer is a mess, but it’s the kind of mess that allows for a degree of back-handed enjoyment at the absurdity of it all.

While this new series makes some dubious choices with its characters and setting (Why did it need to be set in 1989?), the premiere of Dead of Summer provided much of what I look for in a summer show--an enjoyable distraction.

There's a different version of Dead of Summer in which having a character half-named after the Antichrist and half-named after the 20th century's most notorious occultist prophet would be part of a general wink-and-nudge approach to a slew of genre conventions. The actual version premiering on Freeform June 28 is not that fun, smart or creative, and not satisfyingly scary, mysterious or disturbing either.

This mélange of styles may be intentional, but it fails to cohere into anything amusing or frightening.

The result is a disjointed, absurd and only mildly frightening story that, three hours in, is still flailing more frantically than a teen falling out of a canoe into a lake full of corpses.

The supernatural shocks are less scary than the bad acting. [27 Jun - 10 Jul 2016, p.15]